4 Steps to Success with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a huge opportunity, and the good news is that you really don’t need a budget to get started. Yes, it’s obviously helpful, but it’s not required to start making sales.

I’m going to show you the exact four steps for you to get started to set yourself up for success, and to start making sales, without spending any money on your business.

When it comes to business, you’re always going to pay for something. It will either be in time or in money. But I do recognize that for some people, when they first get started, they just aren’t in a position to spend money, and instead they have more time to invest.

Here are the for Steps to Success with Affiliate Marketing

1. Choose A Niche

Now, step number one is to figure out what niche or industry do you want to serve.

This could be dog owners, people interested in creating an online business, or people looking to lose weight, or to get healthy. This is what people consider to be your target audience. Or you can just think of them as the people that you wanna be speaking to directly about your offers. Obviously it’s easier to choose something that you already have some interest in, or maybe even some experience in, as you’re gonna be talking about it and sharing a lot of information about it.

You can and should have more than one offer to promote but you should just focus on one target audience. The different offers that you end up selecting should all serve that very same target audience, just solving different problems that they may have.

All of these things serve that same audience, dog owners. But they are helping those dog owners in different ways. So they all complement each other.

If you decide that you wanna stay focused on helping people who are interested in building an online business, then you could offer an online business opportunity. You could offer training on how to be successful in building an online business. You could offer an email autoresponder, maybe even website hosting, maybe your funnel building site. All serving the very same target audience but in different ways. Here is an article on how to choose a niche.

2. Affiliate Programs

Now the second step is to sign up for some programs that are free to promote.

There are two good options that you could do this with. One being ClickBank, this provides mostly digital products, which often allow you to make a higher commission per sale, sometimes even to 50% of the sale or more.

Another free affiliate option is with Amazon. It’s mostly focused obviously on physical products. And with physical products, you’re often only gonna be making 4 to 7% of that sale price. To get signed up with Amazon, you will likely need to provide them with a website during the signup process. You can quickly slap together a free WordPress blog to fulfill this requirement. I don’t actually recommend trying to market on a free WordPress blog, but grabbing it just as a placeholder to meet this requirement does work.

3. Affiliate Offers

First and foremost you want to look for quality products or services where they’re gonna truly help and serve your audience. Now, you are like their advocate, and you put your reputation on the line every time you refer someone to a product, service, or an opportunity. So it better be good.

It’s always beneficial if you have some personal experience with this product, service, or opportunity yourself, that you can speak to it credibly. But truly, that’s not a requirement, just the best practice.

4. Promotion

Now the fourth step is to start promoting.

And frankly, the easiest way to do this at zero cost and starting from scratch, is really to just create a YouTube channel that is all about serving your target audience. So if your target audience is dog owners like we were just talking about, provide them with dog training tips, or insights, maybe sharing with them some health insights about dogs, so that they can better care for their pets.

Then in every video after giving them some great information, invite the people to check out an offer. So if you do a video about the common ailments of aging dogs, then you could maybe invite people to check out a great dog bed that really supports their joints, and helps aging dogs get a good sleep, or even if they have arthritis problems.

Now if you’re working with people who are looking to create an online business, you could create a video showing them how to set up or even how to use an email autoresponder system. And then invite them to check out that specific system that you just trained them on that you are an affiliate for.

Conclusion

As you move forward and you get to the point that you’re able to invest into your business, one of the very first things that you’re gonna want to do is to create a free giveaway for your audience. And to do that, you’re gonna need a tool, a capture page service like ClickFunnels to get that set up. Now once you have a free giveaway for your audience, you should frequently promote that in your videos. Lets say it’s a PDF download of the core nutrients that your dog needs to live a happy and long life. Well, when people click to download it, they have to provide their email address. And now you’re building an email list, and this should be your ultimate goal with your online business.

With your email list, you’ll be able to create repeat customers and even raging fans, who purchase virtually everything you put out or make referrals for. Plus, you’re creating a safety net in case something, heaven forbid, ever happens to your YouTube channel, you are still able to connect with your audience.